Punctuation Characters vs letters (GNU Coreutils 9.0)
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Coreutils/docs/latest/Punctuation-Characters-vs-letters
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30.2.4 Punctuation Characters vs letters
Rule 2.2.1 dictates that letters sorts earlier than all non-letters (after breaking down a string to digits and non-digits parts).
$ cat input6 a% az $ sort -V input6 az a%
The input strings consist entirely of non-digits, and based on the above algorithm have only one part, all non-digit characters (‘a%’ vs ‘az’).
Each part is then compared lexically, character-by-character. ‘a’ compares identically in both strings.
Rule 2.2.1 dictates that letters (‘z’) sorts earlier than all non-letters (‘%’) - hence ‘az’ appears first (despite ‘z’ having ASCII value of 122, much bigger than ‘%’ with ASCII value 37).
